I believe most web advertising pays only when someone clicks on an ad, so the web site gets nothing except a pay-per-click. Which is almost zero.
This is not correct. Very little "display" advertising on the Web (the big ads with colorful graphics) is sold as CPC.
Cost per click charging is more typical of the text-based advertising that Google sells (AdSense). There also are other systems, such as affiliate marketing and lead generation, but often they don't even look like advertising.
Newspaper sites' display ad inventory is primarily sold by the newspapers' sales forces. Network advertising is a minor component, mostly low-rate junk to fill unsold inventory. Many newspapers also are selling into external networks, especially Yahoo. It's all sold on the basis of cost per thousand impressions, not cost per click.
They may have 100,000 paying subscribers, but they probably charged the same rates for the ads as they did when they were free. So they effectively earned 100,000 subscriptions without losing any money. Let's see the numbers after ad rates have been adjusted. Advertisers aren't stupid and they're tracking these things as well. It would be interesting to see if the subscribers have a higher click-through rate or not, and what advertisers are demanding for their dollar.
If ad rates are adjusted, it will be up, not down.
Online advertising is not sold on the basis of circulation-like figures (total numbers) but rather on a cost per thousand impressions, delivered dynamically through targeting engines. No matter whether there is a paywall in front of the site, you get what you pay for.
Paid-content advocates have been arguing that advertisers will be willing to pay more per thousand impressions if the audience is of higher quality, and that the paywall screens out low-quality pageviews, so the CPM rate can be increased.
I'm not sure I buy that argument. Major websites already have ways to present advertising only to better qualified viewers: geotargeting tools (for screening out ad views from Kazakhstan), demographic targeting based on any information you've disclosed such as your age/gender, and behavioral targeting tools (for targeting based on the fact that you've been reading camera reviews or looking at Hondas).
I've had an 11.6-inch Acer for about a year now, running Ubuntu. I love it. Small enough to take, big enough to use. But I don't know what to call it except "perfect size." Nice for Apple that they are finally catching up. Too bad it costs two and a half times what I paid.
What does the NYT (or any large paper) offer me that I can't get straight from the source (AP) for free? They haven't been doing much real journalism in years, so I'm at a loss.
If you think that, it's because you don't actually read the New York Times.
I'm looking at the NYT homepage right now. There are three wire stories. Everything else is original work by one or more New York Times reporters.
I watch embedded and full-screen Flash videos all the time on a $400 Acer Aspire laptop. That's with a dual-core Celeron. Hulu, YouTube, Vimeo, on-site or embedded in somebody's blog, internal display or big external monitor, all of them work great under Ubuntu.
My daughter's single-core Atom netbook, on the other hand, does get choppy.
Newspapers used to have a position called a "fact-checker".
As a matter of fact, they did not.
While newspapers conventionally have had editors who often checked facts, they weren't called fact-checkers, and their primary function usually was to fix bad writing (sometimes the job was more like translation) and to write headlines to fit layouts. The position was usually called "copy editor" or "copyreader" in the United States and "subeditor" in the UK. The primary responsibility for getting things right has always been placed on the reporter, whose job is to gather information and put it into something resembling the written word.
I've been in journalism for 40 years, and my dad was a newspaper editor before me. The only time I've encountered a "fact checker" has been in connection with a magazine article. Magazine articles often are outsourced to freelancers, whose butts are not necessarily available for kicking the next morning if something is wrong, so fact-checkers are employed to verify information before it's published. Typically they'll call a news source: "Is your name really Heywood Jablome?" There''s no time for that in a daily newsroom.
Of course, the cited "story" is not journalism at all, but rather an announcement pushed out by PR Newswire, which is a publicity release distribution service. Reuters carries PR Newswire because often the "press releases" contain legitimate and useful information, but it fails to adequately label the content for what it really is.
So any perceived decline in the profession of journalism can't be blamed for this wacky crap.
Exact specs, what the hardware is, price, where are they releasing it (which countries), where will I be able to buy it (is it just from carriers?).
You can't even find a Galaxy Tab page on Samsung's website -- they link to one, but it's 404.
However, specs collected from the announcement, press releases and coverage: Android 2.2 (Froyo) Flash 10.1 (Web video looked good and smooth) 1Ghz Hummingbird CPU (Samsung, ARM Cortex A8) PowerVR SGX 540 video 512 MB RAM Internal storage unclear; some reports say 16 GB or 32GB microSD card slot, supporting 32GB additional storage 7" TFT LCD screen, 1024 x 600 resolution Capacitive touchscreen Quad-band GSM/EDGE, triple-band HSUPA/HSDPA, voice and data connectivity Dual SIM cards (not sure why?) 802.11 b/g/n wifi Bluetooth 3.0 13 ounces 7 hour battery life under continuous movie playback Front facing 1.3 megapixel camera for video calling Back facing 3 megapixel autofocusing camera for HD video and still photography with flash HDMI video output port USB (will trickle charge, but not rapid charge) Proprietary 30-pin connector for charging and connectivity to dock 3.5 audio jack; internal stereo speakers Accelerometer, magnetometer, proximity sensor Full external keyboard, optional Automotive dash mount for GPS functionality with Google Maps enhanced for the 7-inch display; presumably this suggests it has a GPS chip, although I have not found anything that says so Will share media to DLNA devices on the same network; should interop with MythTV and XMBC Will be offered by AT&T, Sprint, Verizon and T-Mobile; pricing and dates to be announced by the carriers E-reader software (Kindle, PressDisplay, Zinio, etc.) Thinkfree Office software Media Hub (cloud-based purchase and rental of video and audio programming) with sharing across your compatible Samsung devices
Interestingly, "legacy" Android apps designed for smaller screens are shown at a correct size, framed rather than stretched. A bunch of apps optimized for the 7-inch display were shown.
The 3G model includes wifi. It was demonstrated last night at the rollout with a live video call using Qik.
The wifi-ONLY model is said to be coming, but the date is not revealed, nor is the price. What I wonder about is how it will relate to the 3G model, as advance speculation has been that the carriers will subsidize its price heavily. The wifi-only version could wind up with a list cost significantly higher than the 3G+wifi version.
Networking was the big leap forward from my perpective. I never had mouse responsiveness issues with Win 3, but when it came to plugging in to the ethernet or a modem, it was a train wreck of competing and incompatible networking layers. Depending on which application you needed to use, you might have to reboot into a completely different configuration.
If you wanted to create a dialup Internet-access service, you had to distribute a whole networking bundle to your prospective customers. What a mess!
Win95 ended that chaos.
It was pretty, too. Installing it was a nightmare -- 18 floppy disks, as I recall -- and it was prone to locking up while trying to detect hardware. But if you got it working you thought you'd gone to heaven.
Then the viruses came, and the bluescreens, and joy turned to sorrow.
I know I'm supposed to hate Microsoft, and generally I do, but at the moment I'm feeling sort of charitable toward the doddering old fool. Microsoft has become ineffective, marginalized. Yeah, I know it still controls the non-Apple OS marketplace, but it's become a joke in the areas that represent the future: mobile and tablets. Microsoft tries awfully hard to be C. Montgomery Burns, but lately it's looking a lot more like Abe Simpson.
Over the years Microsoft has benefited quite a bit from open-source software, and by positioning DOS and Windows as an open platforms (anybody could develop for it, without asking permission), it won the first war between open and closed views of the world. If you're under 50 you're probably not old enough to remember how some of the early players in personal computing wanted total platform control to a degree that would make the current Steve Jobs blush.
Today, the real threat isn't Microsoft -- at least not if you discount the 18 bazillion virus-infected botnet computers that attack the average website every hour. The real threat is the total-control view of computing represented by Steve Jobs and the telecom companies that have persuaded Google to sell its soul. Jobs and Verizon are on opposite sides only in that they disagree about who should be in charge. Either way, it's not you.
I don't know what Android does with the maps. But if the maps are fetched dynamically from the network, your old Android phone is going to need a subscription, and you're SOL when you take a wrong turn and wander off the grid. Been there / been burned by Blackberry.
But the truth is BP is "recommending" him for a "non-executive" position on the board of directors of a venture in Russia. So he can fly in for occasional meetings, collect payments that would cover an entire village of Russian workers, and keep sailing Bob, his yacht, in England. Getting his life back, and all that.
There's no kind way to say it: Windows Phone 7 will be a failure. Announced to much bravado in February as the platform that would breathe life into Microsoft's mobile ambitions, Windows Phone 7 looked based on very early previews as if it might bring something new and exciting to the table. Back then, I noted that I was impressed by what I saw -- with the caveat "so far."
No caveats now: Windows Phone 7 is a waste of time and money. It's a platform that no carrier, device maker, developer, or user should bother with. Microsoft should kill it before it ships and admit that it's out of the mobile game for good. It is supposed to ship around Christmas 2010, but anyone who gets one will prefer a lump of coal. I really mean that.
They call it syncing but isn't it just centralisation?
Perhaps you were asking a serious question -- and the answer is: No, it isn't JUST centralization.
Syncing isn't just between a device and cloud storage. It can accommodate multiple devices of multiple types, and "current state" information, not just files.
Fully implemented, you should be able to stop reading a book on your tablet, open it on your phone, and automatically pick up the same paragraph. Or stop writing midsentence, go home, and continue.
Data can be backed up into cloud storage but reside wherever it makes sense, so disconnected operations should Just Work. HTML5 supports local storage, and there are other tools than HTML 5 at your disposal.
We already have parts of this. For example Google Chrome syncs all bookmarks across multiple devices via the Google mothership. Tomboy on Ubuntu syncs notes through Ubuntu One. Google Docs have had offline functionality through Gears for years now (you can even write/edit while on an airplane without wifi) and will be moving to HTML5 soon. All my contacts sync between work and home and phone and laptops. My calendaring is still a frakking mess, but that's because Microsoft is both evil and incompetent, and we use Exchange, but that too shall pass.
You stop thinking about "where did I leave that document" because all your documents are always available on all your devices, and you can leave your thumb drive on your dresser without being rendered helpless.
Over the next five years there's going to be a huge push for this sort of thing.
Things to worry about include privacy and stability (including financial) of the cloud service provider. Things to not worry about include blowing a hard disk and losing all your stuff, because there's lots of redundancy in the system.
Keep in mind that among the flood of horrid homepages with purple backgrounds, jumping frogs, blinking stars and background MIDI tunes, there also emerged hundreds of thousands of highly valuable niche Web resources created by highly motivated nonprofessionals... and Google figured out a (community-powered) algorithm for finding the good stuff.
According to the documentation, App Inventor is based on Open Blocks, which is in turn modeled after Scratch, and uses Kawa (a Scheme implementation) to produce Java.
As for the Blackberry Storm... it's best not to speak of these things.
Why aren't newspaper come together and build or enhance an open source software, just for the need of the newspaper industry?
For the Web: http://groups.drupal.org/newspapers-on-drupal would be one example; lots of contributions to the open-source Drupal project from newspapers and broadcasters. Django and Zope, both of which were created at newspaper companies, also are examples.
For print: JRC is pioneering. Printies are technologically conservative (otherwise they wouldn't be printies) and print IT departments tend to be defensive. I don't know how bad things were at Journal Register when John Paton took over, but it's not unusual to see daily newspapers dependent on an OS 9 Macintosh that's driving an imagesetter.
What Paton is trying to do is not really about open source or free software in the RMS definition, but more about shaking up all the assumptions in a company that needed a good shake.
Because it's a pain to haul around. Full-size laptops suck batteries. They're heavy and clumsy. A 15-inch laptop seems like a good idea until you lug it around for three or four hours and then sit down in seat 4B on a CRJ. You can't even get a full-size laptop open on your typical crappy airline seat these days.
Netbooks are great for portability, but their screen size is too small and the squished keyboards suck.
The advantage of the 11.6 form factor is that it gives you near-netbook portability, but it's big enough for serious work and there's enough space for normal-size keys.
I have an Acer 1410 in that size. It's great. It makes my 13-inch Macbook feel like a whale. I much prefer it for traveling. In fact, I prefer it, period.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe most web advertising pays only when someone clicks on an ad, so the web site gets nothing except a pay-per-click. Which is almost zero.
This is not correct. Very little "display" advertising on the Web (the big ads with colorful graphics) is sold as CPC.
Cost per click charging is more typical of the text-based advertising that Google sells (AdSense). There also are other systems, such as affiliate marketing and lead generation, but often they don't even look like advertising.
Newspaper sites' display ad inventory is primarily sold by the newspapers' sales forces. Network advertising is a minor component, mostly low-rate junk to fill unsold inventory. Many newspapers also are selling into external networks, especially Yahoo. It's all sold on the basis of cost per thousand impressions, not cost per click.
They may have 100,000 paying subscribers, but they probably charged the same rates for the ads as they did when they were free. So they effectively earned 100,000 subscriptions without losing any money. Let's see the numbers after ad rates have been adjusted. Advertisers aren't stupid and they're tracking these things as well. It would be interesting to see if the subscribers have a higher click-through rate or not, and what advertisers are demanding for their dollar.
If ad rates are adjusted, it will be up, not down.
Online advertising is not sold on the basis of circulation-like figures (total numbers) but rather on a cost per thousand impressions, delivered dynamically through targeting engines. No matter whether there is a paywall in front of the site, you get what you pay for.
Paid-content advocates have been arguing that advertisers will be willing to pay more per thousand impressions if the audience is of higher quality, and that the paywall screens out low-quality pageviews, so the CPM rate can be increased.
I'm not sure I buy that argument. Major websites already have ways to present advertising only to better qualified viewers: geotargeting tools (for screening out ad views from Kazakhstan), demographic targeting based on any information you've disclosed such as your age/gender, and behavioral targeting tools (for targeting based on the fact that you've been reading camera reviews or looking at Hondas).
Intel's netbook definition would exclude the 11.6 Air on the basis of size and sufficient CPU power for multitasking and HD video. The flash storage is certainly netbookish, but 64 gigs used to be a big hard drive.
I've had an 11.6-inch Acer for about a year now, running Ubuntu. I love it. Small enough to take, big enough to use. But I don't know what to call it except "perfect size." Nice for Apple that they are finally catching up. Too bad it costs two and a half times what I paid.
The list of issues currently blocking a release candidate is publicly available.
I'd point you in the direction of the Google, except that you might need an explanation of what that means.
Just do like I do. All your files on your desktop. :-)
What does the NYT (or any large paper) offer me that I can't get straight from the source (AP) for free? They haven't been doing much real journalism in years, so I'm at a loss.
If you think that, it's because you don't actually read the New York Times.
I'm looking at the NYT homepage right now. There are three wire stories. Everything else is original work by one or more New York Times reporters.
I watch embedded and full-screen Flash videos all the time on a $400 Acer Aspire laptop. That's with a dual-core Celeron. Hulu, YouTube, Vimeo, on-site or embedded in somebody's blog, internal display or big external monitor, all of them work great under Ubuntu.
My daughter's single-core Atom netbook, on the other hand, does get choppy.
Newspapers used to have a position called a "fact-checker" .
As a matter of fact, they did not.
While newspapers conventionally have had editors who often checked facts, they weren't called fact-checkers, and their primary function usually was to fix bad writing (sometimes the job was more like translation) and to write headlines to fit layouts. The position was usually called "copy editor" or "copyreader" in the United States and "subeditor" in the UK. The primary responsibility for getting things right has always been placed on the reporter, whose job is to gather information and put it into something resembling the written word.
I've been in journalism for 40 years, and my dad was a newspaper editor before me. The only time I've encountered a "fact checker" has been in connection with a magazine article. Magazine articles often are outsourced to freelancers, whose butts are not necessarily available for kicking the next morning if something is wrong, so fact-checkers are employed to verify information before it's published. Typically they'll call a news source: "Is your name really Heywood Jablome?" There''s no time for that in a daily newsroom.
Of course, the cited "story" is not journalism at all, but rather an announcement pushed out by PR Newswire, which is a publicity release distribution service. Reuters carries PR Newswire because often the "press releases" contain legitimate and useful information, but it fails to adequately label the content for what it really is.
So any perceived decline in the profession of journalism can't be blamed for this wacky crap.
Exact specs, what the hardware is, price, where are they releasing it (which countries), where will I be able to buy it (is it just from carriers?).
You can't even find a Galaxy Tab page on Samsung's website -- they link to one, but it's 404.
However, specs collected from the announcement, press releases and coverage:
Android 2.2 (Froyo)
Flash 10.1 (Web video looked good and smooth)
1Ghz Hummingbird CPU (Samsung, ARM Cortex A8)
PowerVR SGX 540 video
512 MB RAM
Internal storage unclear; some reports say 16 GB or 32GB
microSD card slot, supporting 32GB additional storage
7" TFT LCD screen, 1024 x 600 resolution
Capacitive touchscreen
Quad-band GSM/EDGE, triple-band HSUPA/HSDPA, voice and data connectivity
Dual SIM cards (not sure why?)
802.11 b/g/n wifi
Bluetooth 3.0
13 ounces
7 hour battery life under continuous movie playback
Front facing 1.3 megapixel camera for video calling
Back facing 3 megapixel autofocusing camera for HD video and still photography with flash
HDMI video output port
USB (will trickle charge, but not rapid charge)
Proprietary 30-pin connector for charging and connectivity to dock
3.5 audio jack; internal stereo speakers
Accelerometer, magnetometer, proximity sensor
Full external keyboard, optional
Automotive dash mount for GPS functionality with Google Maps enhanced for the 7-inch display; presumably this suggests it has a GPS chip, although I have not found anything that says so
Will share media to DLNA devices on the same network; should interop with MythTV and XMBC
Will be offered by AT&T, Sprint, Verizon and T-Mobile; pricing and dates to be announced by the carriers
E-reader software (Kindle, PressDisplay, Zinio, etc.)
Thinkfree Office software
Media Hub (cloud-based purchase and rental of video and audio programming) with sharing across your compatible Samsung devices
Interestingly, "legacy" Android apps designed for smaller screens are shown at a correct size, framed rather than stretched. A bunch of apps optimized for the 7-inch display were shown.
The 3G model includes wifi. It was demonstrated last night at the rollout with a live video call using Qik.
The wifi-ONLY model is said to be coming, but the date is not revealed, nor is the price. What I wonder about is how it will relate to the 3G model, as advance speculation has been that the carriers will subsidize its price heavily. The wifi-only version could wind up with a list cost significantly higher than the 3G+wifi version.
The IT world link takes you to an interstitial ad, followed by a godawful mishmash of crap.
Here's a link to the original post: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/517
Networking was the big leap forward from my perpective. I never had mouse responsiveness issues with Win 3, but when it came to plugging in to the ethernet or a modem, it was a train wreck of competing and incompatible networking layers. Depending on which application you needed to use, you might have to reboot into a completely different configuration.
If you wanted to create a dialup Internet-access service, you had to distribute a whole networking bundle to your prospective customers. What a mess!
Win95 ended that chaos.
It was pretty, too. Installing it was a nightmare -- 18 floppy disks, as I recall -- and it was prone to locking up while trying to detect hardware. But if you got it working you thought you'd gone to heaven.
Then the viruses came, and the bluescreens, and joy turned to sorrow.
I know I'm supposed to hate Microsoft, and generally I do, but at the moment I'm feeling sort of charitable toward the doddering old fool. Microsoft has become ineffective, marginalized. Yeah, I know it still controls the non-Apple OS marketplace, but it's become a joke in the areas that represent the future: mobile and tablets. Microsoft tries awfully hard to be C. Montgomery Burns, but lately it's looking a lot more like Abe Simpson.
Over the years Microsoft has benefited quite a bit from open-source software, and by positioning DOS and Windows as an open platforms (anybody could develop for it, without asking permission), it won the first war between open and closed views of the world. If you're under 50 you're probably not old enough to remember how some of the early players in personal computing wanted total platform control to a degree that would make the current Steve Jobs blush.
Today, the real threat isn't Microsoft -- at least not if you discount the 18 bazillion virus-infected botnet computers that attack the average website every hour. The real threat is the total-control view of computing represented by Steve Jobs and the telecom companies that have persuaded Google to sell its soul. Jobs and Verizon are on opposite sides only in that they disagree about who should be in charge. Either way, it's not you.
Oh, I guess I could actually read the summary. :-)
Does this third-party software do routing and announcements?
I don't know what Android does with the maps. But if the maps are fetched dynamically from the network, your old Android phone is going to need a subscription, and you're SOL when you take a wrong turn and wander off the grid. Been there / been burned by Blackberry.
If only.
But the truth is BP is "recommending" him for a "non-executive" position on the board of directors of a venture in Russia. So he can fly in for occasional meetings, collect payments that would cover an entire village of Russian workers, and keep sailing Bob, his yacht, in England. Getting his life back, and all that.
From http://www.infoworld.com/d/mobilize/windows-phone-7-dont-bother-disaster-211?page=0,0
Cloud html5 app syncing
They call it syncing but isn't it just centralisation?
Perhaps you were asking a serious question -- and the answer is: No, it isn't JUST centralization.
Syncing isn't just between a device and cloud storage. It can accommodate multiple devices of multiple types, and "current state" information, not just files.
Fully implemented, you should be able to stop reading a book on your tablet, open it on your phone, and automatically pick up the same paragraph. Or stop writing midsentence, go home, and continue.
Data can be backed up into cloud storage but reside wherever it makes sense, so disconnected operations should Just Work. HTML5 supports local storage, and there are other tools than HTML 5 at your disposal.
We already have parts of this. For example Google Chrome syncs all bookmarks across multiple devices via the Google mothership. Tomboy on Ubuntu syncs notes through Ubuntu One. Google Docs have had offline functionality through Gears for years now (you can even write/edit while on an airplane without wifi) and will be moving to HTML5 soon. All my contacts sync between work and home and phone and laptops. My calendaring is still a frakking mess, but that's because Microsoft is both evil and incompetent, and we use Exchange, but that too shall pass.
You stop thinking about "where did I leave that document" because all your documents are always available on all your devices, and you can leave your thumb drive on your dresser without being rendered helpless.
Over the next five years there's going to be a huge push for this sort of thing.
Things to worry about include privacy and stability (including financial) of the cloud service provider. Things to not worry about include blowing a hard disk and losing all your stuff, because there's lots of redundancy in the system.
Keep in mind that among the flood of horrid homepages with purple backgrounds, jumping frogs, blinking stars and background MIDI tunes, there also emerged hundreds of thousands of highly valuable niche Web resources created by highly motivated nonprofessionals ... and Google figured out a (community-powered) algorithm for finding the good stuff.
According to the documentation, App Inventor is based on Open Blocks, which is in turn modeled after Scratch, and uses Kawa (a Scheme implementation) to produce Java.
As for the Blackberry Storm ... it's best not to speak of these things.
Why aren't newspaper come together and build or enhance an open source software, just for the need of the newspaper industry?
For the Web: http://groups.drupal.org/newspapers-on-drupal would be one example; lots of contributions to the open-source Drupal project from newspapers and broadcasters. Django and Zope, both of which were created at newspaper companies, also are examples.
For print: JRC is pioneering. Printies are technologically conservative (otherwise they wouldn't be printies) and print IT departments tend to be defensive. I don't know how bad things were at Journal Register when John Paton took over, but it's not unusual to see daily newspapers dependent on an OS 9 Macintosh that's driving an imagesetter.
What Paton is trying to do is not really about open source or free software in the RMS definition, but more about shaking up all the assumptions in a company that needed a good shake.
This isn't a one-day thing.
You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. Where do you get your information? Some libertarian kook blog?
FDIC is not the Fed.
FDIC doesn't guarantee banks.
FDIC guarantees individuals' deposits. Your checking account. Your savings account.
When a bank can't cover its deposits, FDIC swoops and seizes the bank.
The bank is shut down. Management is fired. Stockholders lose everything.
Absolutely the opposite of what you imagine to be the case.
In 5.0.375.55 the protocol appears to be back in the location bar, at least on Linux.
Not sure why you wouldn't get an Inspiron 1545.
Because it's a pain to haul around. Full-size laptops suck batteries. They're heavy and clumsy. A 15-inch laptop seems like a good idea until you lug it around for three or four hours and then sit down in seat 4B on a CRJ. You can't even get a full-size laptop open on your typical crappy airline seat these days.
Netbooks are great for portability, but their screen size is too small and the squished keyboards suck.
The advantage of the 11.6 form factor is that it gives you near-netbook portability, but it's big enough for serious work and there's enough space for normal-size keys.
I have an Acer 1410 in that size. It's great. It makes my 13-inch Macbook feel like a whale. I much prefer it for traveling. In fact, I prefer it, period.